Mike Orth – Booya!

I’ve been fielding questions about fading audio in Flex lately and decided to package up my FadingSound. I worked on this about a year ago and then threw it on the shelf, so I’ve begun cleaning it up and wanted to release a prototype as a proof of concept. This class creates the Sound and SoundChannel objects for you and fades in and out each song in a playlist. It’s so simple, all you have to do is create an instance say:

where “playlist” is an ArrayCollection of URLs. If you just want to have 1 song fade in or out, only put 1 URL in the array. Optional params specify the length of fades and the duration of the songs (if you want to scan through 10 second clips for example). See it in action here.

Fading 1 song in was the easy part – the hurlde was to have 2 channels playing at the same time and control their fades to give the illusion of concurrecny. There are still some bugs in it with buffering songs and fading out at the right time with dynamic tracks which is why the example only plays short clips rather than full songs. I’m in the process of cleaning that up and will update things when I get time. Also I’m going to have an mp3 player that utilizes this where you can create XML playlists to feed it. Feel free to drop me line with features you’d like or any comments on the FadingSound.

Application demoing the Prototype